Reliable operation of power systems is a primary
challenge for the system operators. With the advancement in
technology and grid automation, power systems are becoming
more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The main goal of adversaries
is to take advantage of these vulnerabilities and destabilize
the system. This paper describes a game-theoretic approach to
attacker / defender modeling in power systems. In our models, the
attacker can strategically identify the subset of substations that
maximize damage when compromised. However, the defender can
identify the critical subset of substations to protect in order to
minimize the damage when an attacker launches a cyber-attack.
The algorithms for these models are applied to the standard
IEEE-14, 39, and 57 bus examples to identify the critical set of
substations given an attacker and a defender budget.